There was a crucial juncture in American history about 150 years ago where if truth and justice had not prevailed, we would all have ended up cheeseheads.
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Some cheeseheads got so heated up over this that they became almost fonduelike (or, as they say in Wisconsin, Fond du Lac). Wisconsin legislator Moses Strong sounded in an 1843 speech like he wanted to declare war against Illinois: “Wisconsin will never submit to so gross a violation of her rights and after she has done all to obtain peaceable redress, will resort to every other means in her power to protect and preserve her rights . . . whatever be the sacrifice.”
You have to understand that the 1830s and ’40s were brazen times, when the settlers of the new frontier were ready to go to war over anything, even Toledo. A dispute between Ohio and Michigan over who owned the territory of which Toledo is now the centerpiece got so hot that the governor of Michigan actually raised a militia to fight Ohio. And it wasn’t, as you might suspect, a matter of each state defiantly claiming that Toledo belonged to the other. The governor of Michigan actually wanted Toledo! Fortunately, the dispute was settled by peaceful means. I don’t know how. I think Ohio got the short straw. But as dumb wars go, that one would have been right up there with the Falkland Islands.
Anyway, the people of Wisconsin kept rejecting the idea of any new union, and the annexation push died for good around the time Wisconsin had gathered enough bodies to become a state by natural means, in 1848.
